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A Privacy Choice

A Privacy Choice
By rands

I departed Safari several years ago for performance and stability issues. Too often, I was finding myself in a situation where Safari was wedged or just plain slow. As the majority of my time is spent staring at a browser, this was unacceptable, so I moved to Chrome. Yeah, the typography rendering wasn’t as good, and my bookmark bar looked like a circus, but it launched quickly and remained fast.

No major complaints. Chrome is frequently updated, the keyboard support is just fine, the browser is fast, and I can’t remember the last time the application crashed. Both bookmarks and extensions are stored in the cloud, so my settings gracefully followed me between machines. No complaints…

… but a lingering worry.

Apple’s 2017 WWDC was dense with announcements, but one feature stuck in my head: disabling auto-play videos with audio. There is no better way to destroy flow than having a random video start playing audio as I’m digesting the state of the world via Feedly. Chrome, like Safari, has a rich set of developer-friendly extensions to augment browser functionality, so I found one that disabled autoplay of videos. The problem? The plug-in I selected was garbage. It did an excellent job of blocking auto-play videos, but there are videos you want to auto-play like Netflix or YouTube and the process of whitelisting these “approved” sites was error-prone and laborious.

My ears perked up when Craig Federighi announce that Safari would block auto playing videos with audio. I’ve yet to see the feature work, but by having the feature engineered into the browser, I am expecting thoughtfulness with low friction affordances allowing sites where I want autoplay.

Disabling was the impetus for considering a migration back to Safari, but the more I considered the situation, the more it became a required migration. To understand my reasoning, consider why autoplay videos with sound exist at all. Why does such a user-hostile feature exist? It starts with a difference of perspective.

There are legitimate and moral businesses who just love interrupting your flow with their message because that is how they earn money. They are rewarded as a function of how effectively they can interrupt you. They do not see the harm in this, and they do not call it interruption: they call it good business.

This is how it started. There was a meeting years ago at one of these businesses when Boris in customer acquisition suggested, “Hey, let’s just auto-play a video with sound and see what happens?” and every single other person in the meeting laughed loudly at him. They said what you and I know, “People are going to hate it. I’d hate it.”

Boris stood his ground and suggested, “Hold it, hold it. Let’s just test one page and one video for a month and see what the data says.” The rest of the team begrudgingly agreed because the company had this value painted on the walls that read, “Data wins arguments.”

Not surprisingly, the resulting data was incredible. Both awareness and other measures were way up. No one bothered to run an NPS survey, and no one bothered to look at the complaints to customer support because the data on hand were both blindingly delightful… and profitable.

It is this difference in perspective that has me back on Safari. It is not that I believe Google is evil (they aren’t) or that their browser is substandard (it’s exceptional). It’s that I’m certain there are Boris-like meetings going on all the time and they are packed with intelligent, rationale, and well-intentioned humans whose perspective is, “We need to run a healthy business, and our business is advertising.”

Google’s business is a function of their ability to convince other businesses that they have the most efficient means of delivering relevant Ad X to Targeted Human Y so that they’ll purchase Product Z. I have zero issue with Google building a multi-bajillion business convincing the Planet Earth that they are best in class in ad delivery efficiency (they are), but I am not convinced that Google’s interests align with mine.

Google’s compelling answer to ban heinous ads does not include affordances to block tracking, and I wouldn’t expect them to because they are an advertising company.2 That’d be like requiring Apple to legally embrace shitty typography. No way. Apple’s business is design, and that means Apple will prioritize low-friction useful and approachable elegance no matter what.

Google privacy policy is vast and worth a read. There is an army of privacy-minded humans in the Google privacy organization, and I trust they are trying to do the right thing about privacy. It is not this team’s intent where I have concerns. It is not the meetings they are invited to that I care about, it’s the meeting where privacy is not represented.

There is no nefarious reason they weren’t invited to this hypothetical meeting. It’s just a quick strategy meeting on a topic seemingly unrelated to privacy, and it results in an inconsequential decision that creates a privacy crack. It’s a tiny little space that no one is going to notice for years until someone somewhere else on the planet is going to find a clever way to use that crack for nefarious or semi-nefarious for-profit activities that also violates your privacy.

And I’m not even worried about this one meeting. I’m worried about all of the meetings and the collective compounding impact of all the small seemingly inconsequential decisions in a company where the business is selling advertising versus a company where the business is selling product.

I have great respect for the engineering teams building Safari and Chrome. They are building a window into the Internet, and the Internet is a hostile, for-profit, lying beast that actively fights the good intentions and well-debated choices of engineers and designers. Tough gig.3

But I get a choice.

I’m fine with advertising. It funds media and services I trust and depend upon. I appreciate ads that deliver value to me. I understand the more a company knows about me, the better they can deliver me ads I care about, but if that is their core business, I will forever question their motivations regarding the ethical use of my personal information.

I choose a business that began as a company building products to empower the individual. Apple has spent decades making approachable, functional, and ascetically pleasing technology for the individual and this bolsters their claim they want to protect the privacy of the individual.

I’m continuing to use Adblock Pro, and as part of the research for this piece, I started using Disconnect.Me. It appears Disconnect.Me duplicates tracking blocking in Adblock Pro, but I like the visual map that Disconnect.Me gives me regarding trackers. ↩

Via Disconnect.Me, you will see four trackers on Rands: Google Analytics, Chartbeat, Twitter, and Gravatar. I’m planning on removing or replacing each of them all. With the demise of Mint, I’m in the market for self-hosted analytics. Drop me a note. ↩

I’m also evaluating the Brave browser. First impression: many rough edges. ↩

HTTPS is coming for Rands. I’ve got the certificate all set-up, but the process of converting the rest of the site is… laborious. ↩